1788 Search results for "62"

by Benji Hart       1. I’m a teenager, attending the annual Kwanzaa celebration at Amherst College, the small private school where my dad is a professor. A modest band of Black students and faculty have gathered for dinner in the Octagon. The plaster building, lemon meringue in both color and texture, was reclaimed […]

By Johnae Strong  A film by Johnaé Strong Some works capture the beauty of Black life.Others hold its tension, its memory, its muscle.This one does all of that—and then breathes into it. Black Things Today, directed by Johnaé Strong, is a cinematic offering rooted in presence, ritual, and return. Told through the lives of three […]

By Jenn M. Jackson April 24, 2024 In recent months, Black women’s educational credentials and professional qualifications have been a central topic in the news media following the public attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to be President of Harvard University, and the ongoing political debates about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) […]

by Mustafa Ali-Smith, Originally posted on June 30, 2020 As protests continue on both the national and global scale, widespread call-to-actions ramp up. Dismantling, defunding, and divesting from the police and providing police-free schools are becoming a part of everyday conversations. Early educational institutions have even begun to respond to these call-to-actions by ending their […]

by Alycia Kamil We Speak Our City Back On Language, Gentrification, and Black Presence in Chicago There are stories that arrive already smoothed out. Made digestible for funders, developers, and media outlets. The kind that trades in progress narratives and polished soundbites. This is not that kind of story. This piece opens differently. The voice […]

by E’mon Lauren   Chicago, a crafty caucus, we cocooned in. a kid’s folded cot and cubby. we the poster childs. the classes, the pastels and pastillage. we be born here. we burn the bridges, the borders. the blues, crossing and cutting, our lines, a Van Gogh. our skyline, a Monet we walk through. we […]

A history of forced institutionalization in service of white supremacy

*Editor’s note: This piece has been deeply informed by conversations with my friend and colleague Preston Anderson through the years, among other things. A few months ago, I posted a Facebook status regarding a viral meme featuring Disney’s cartoon version of Pocahontas and John Smith, arguing that it promoted white supremacist ideas of interracial relationships […]

We’ve already been taught LGBTQ history. Unfortunately, too many of us don’t even know that we have been. We’ve already heard countless lectures about icons who happened to be queer—learned about their lives and work, read their words, recited their speeches, seen them remembered through art and poetry, and heralded them as some of the […]

By Tonya Pennington Every now and then, I’ll hear a news story about a mixed raced person that makes me sigh. This was the case recently with chef and entrepreneur Ayesha Curry, who discussed her experience with her heritage on The View. Since her mother is Jamaican-Chinese and her father is African-American and Polish, Curry […]

This essay contains discussions of racialized sexual violence and mentions r/pe and molestation.  by Mekleit Dix The Handmaid’s Tale is a wildly popular American Television show based on a novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood. It portrays a dystopian nightmare: sterility in women becomes a widespread epidemic resulting in a break down of […]

Editor’s Note: This month at BYP, we will be exploring Black Liberation & Organizing, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics. How do we hold politicians accountable to Black communities? Is that even possible? What should be our role in the electoral politics? What does abolition look like in practice? What […]